Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/86

 IV. THE POEMS OF JOHN MILTON

HOUGH most of us acknowledge that Milton dwells on the heights of English poetry, we are likely, because of his very sublimity, to look up to him with awe, as unapproachable. The charm of the minor poems of his youth may be felt without difficulty; but the obstacles to loving intimacy with his most important works, those into which he poured "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit," seem many and forbidding. We remember that Byron sneered at his angels and archangels joining in quibbles, and we apprehend that his theology must be dull or perplexing. We open "Paradise Lost" at almost any page, and meet with phrases and allusions that are unfamiliar. Habituated by our contemporary literature and journalism to receive an easy delight from the shocking, the bizarre, and the exceptional, we are not immediately attracted by an art whose characteristics are dignity and restraint. In Dr. Johnson's words, "we desert our master and seek for companions." As if to encourage our truancy, there arise those who question whether, after all, Milton is a master. The chief of a prominent American library refuses to advise the reading of "Paradise Lost," an ultra-modern critic professes to have discovered "new literary valuations" which at last destroy the poet's long-established reputation, and respectable literary journals actually find it necessary to defend a fame that had seemed imperishable.

THE SOURCES OF MILTON'S GREATNESS The serious-minded who, despite such babblings, conclude that he to whom every great man of letters from Dryden to Meredith has granted the crowning laurel must surely be one whom it is an honorable privilege to know, may be assured that the obstacles to familiarity with Milton are not at all insuperable. From three 76